This report contains details about CISP, the results from the online survey as well as the benefits of assuming an ontology methodology when producing meta-data.

This report has two main goals:

To introduce a new formalism for the description of scientific papers CISP (the Core Information about Scientific Papers);

Attract more attention to ontologies as a valuable methodology for developing metadata.

The report demonstrates the advantages of an ontology methodology for developing metadata by applying it to the analysis of the Dublin Core metadata (DC). An ontology approach allows detecting potential weaknesses in the representation of the DC terms. Such weaknesses include overlap in the semantic meaning between the terms, logically incoherent representation of temporal and spatial relations as well as incoherence in the representation of content. An ontology can also suggest improvements to the DC.
The report describes an ontology methodology to construct CISP metadata about the content of papers. It makes use of an ontology of experiments EXPO proposed at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth as a core ontology, and DOLCE (a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) developed at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Italy as an upper level ontology.
CISP is a defined set of leaf classes from these ontologies. It includes such key classes as <Goal of investigation>, <Object of investigation>, <Research method>, <Result>, <Conclusion>.

CISP can be used to generate abstracts and summaries of papers and also to facilitate storage and retrieval of information. CISP will constitute the basis for the ART tool. The latter is an authoring tool for the semantic annotation of papers stored in digital repositories. ART is intended for the semi-automatic annotation of data and metadata describing the scientific investigation represented in a research paper. ART will also be able to aid in the expression of research results directly in both a human and machine readable format, through the composition of text using ontology-based templates and stored typical key phrases. .
To find out more about ontology methodology refer to chapters 2 and 3 .
To learn about the proposed CISP metadata you can start reading from chapter 4 onwards.